✨ Positive News ✨ to raise the mood during the holidays 🎄

Happy holidays!

I share positive world news here and there on Threads. This week, Nitish challenged me to post one every day till the New Year.
I challenged everyone else 🤣

In today's 3-in-3, you'll see a selection of those news. 😜

Thing 1 - How we're fighting cancer

📉 Cancer mortality in 🇪🇺 Europe in 2023 decreased by 6.5% for men and 3.7% for women from 2018.

📉 Over the past 30 years, the 🇺🇸 U.S. saw a 33% decline in cancer mortality

☀️ 🇦🇺 Australia reported a notable decline in skin cancer among individuals under 40

🔬 There were major breakthroughs in treating colon, skin, bladder, and cervical cancers

💊 Pfizer will provide its patented cancer medications at cost to over 1.2B people in low-income nations

Thing 2 - Countries eliminated diseases

Cancer is just one of many diseases in the world! But we're making progress on others too!

🇪🇬 Egypt became the 1st country to eliminate hepatitis C.

🇲🇻 Maldives became the 1st country to eliminate leprosy.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh became the 1st country to eliminate black fever and also eliminated elephantiasis.

🇳🇪 Niger became the 1st African country to eliminate river blindness.

And that's not all because...

🇧🇯 Benin, 🇲🇱 Mali, and 🇮🇶 Iraq eliminated trachoma.
🇹🇱 Timor-Leste, 🇧🇹 Bhutan, and 🇰🇵 North Korea eliminated rubella.
🇬🇭 Ghana eliminated sleeping sickness.
🇦🇿 Azerbaijan, 🇹🇯 Tajikistan, and 🇧🇿 Belize eliminated malaria.

Thing 3 - AI progress didn't take a break

So here's a selection of what I've come across this week:

• Etched AI claims to have pioneered burning the Transformer architecture onto a chip - the world’s most powerful server for Transformer inference

Screenshot of the chip from Etched AI website

• VoiceDual transforms your voice into someone else
• Mistral declared on French national radio they'll aim to release an open-source model at the level of GOT4 in 2024
• Google introduced VideoPoet - LLM for zero-shot video generation

1 min demo of VideoPoet

• Suno AI lets you create a song by asking for it - and it's not even bad
• Midjourney 6.0 is live! - from-scratch trained model, improved text generation, and everything else
• Google DeepMind introduced GraphCast - an AI model trained on 40 years of data that can generate 10-day weather forecasts faster and more precise than traditional methods

Next week I'll reflect on my 2023 predictions and try to make some for the next year. See you then!

Cheers, Zvonimir